The Mole People (They Live Underground)

I have to follow up my post yesterday with one about the other aspect of living underneath New York City: the underground homeless.

The joys of Darktown stand in stark contrast to the nonfiction profiles of NYC's fabled underground homeless--regularly referred to as the Mole People. I've read Jennifer Toth's (supposedly) nonfiction account of life in the subway tunnels, and seen the documentary Dark Days, created by a man who lived in one of these underground cities for two years. And holy cow, are the bleak.

Apparently, living underground as a homeless person is a step up from living homeless on the streets: there's a roof (of sorts) over your head. Occasionally, you're able to steal water and often able to steal electricity, so there's amenities like lights and television. The title of the documentary Dark Days comes from a description a former homeless man gives of his years living in the tunnels (this is totally paraphrased): 'Living it, when I was in it, it didn't seem so bad. But now when I look back, I see that those were some dark days.'

So, obviously, there's a disconnect between what really happens to those who live underground and what we'd like to imagine living underground as being like. This was even evident in the descriptions that the underground homeless would give Jennifer Toth of areas that she couldn't go to, that were "just a little further underground":

More plausible than Ghost Cliff is the huge underground room "with a piano and tiled floor and mirrors all around" that Jamall says he found. An elderly homeless woman later described to me a similar room in which about fifty homeless people live. She adds a fountain to the decor. "Fantastic," she said.

Toth mostly gets called out on her complete credulity of these stories when she's criticized about her book, and fairly so. It seems pretty obvious that a room like this--piano and fountain and all--simply can't exist. But if we accept that this meme of a vast, unpopulated underground space is so pervasive in our culture that even the people who really live underground believe it--I think that's really fascinating.